Month: March 2017

Happy birthday. You sit alone

& play the scratched LP

That’s always been yours,

A dead singer’s uplift

Is all you’ve ever needed.

 

Memory is a trick—

Like rebellion

In youth

Visions & results

Remain far apart,

But at least

That  (you

think) is

Something one can

Count on.

 

Through a small window

Under the eaves

You see neighborhood

Children

Walking home

From school

Their rain jackets

Yellow as finches.

 

A compact life this year,

You & Miles Davis

In the attic—

Happy birthday.

Happy birthday.

& time to turn the record over.

 

 

Hilarious to be the blind boy who loves Brahms

Face pressed to fabric speaker of radio

Holding fast, seaward, first hint

Of big idea—cardamon pastry

In his hand—rain

At the window

 

1958 & grownups

Sleeping, Helsinki

Late Winter

Ships calling

From the harbor

 

His heart beating

As if he’d

Inherited it

From a gull

 

Picking mushrooms

A proper Scandinavian

Original food of poverty

Summer of baby coffins

 

Where are the songs?

I’ve one or two

Funereal cradle lullabys

Old Finland

 

Sometimes play them

On a guitar

Now end of Winter

Preparing for Spring

 

That is, my simple trousers

Hung well

On my stippled

Inefficient legs

& I was right with the world

 

Belonged

On the street

Had contributions—

Beside

The village pump

I sang a short song

 

The seahorse’s coordinates

Had their way with me then

No longer welcome

In the story teller’s circle

I was far at sea

Without friends by sundown

Silent laughter

History of marginalia

Scribes kicking one another

During the Mass

A stray cat walks in circles

Everyone has scars on his back

 

“What’s behind this writing?”

Says the instructor

Who scarcely knows what he asks

In my grandmother’s attic I found a silver toothpick

Buried in a small wooden box

Like Egyptian sarcophagi

For mummified crickets

Something funereal

 

Once there was a grand occasion

1906 the Great Caruso home

After San Francisco

Everyone raising a glass

At Del Pezzo’s

 

Strangers lovers

Grateful

To be alive

In the age of song

& the tenor handing out his souvenirs

 

 

One more day I’m a poet
Rolling the planet across a table
Infantile game–macassar oil
On the chairs, Victorian bookshelf
Crammed with taxonomies,
Yes, a stuffed owl

Everyone wants the source
Of the Loire or a finely woven
Net, something informative
As we feel
When the moon comes close
& we’re picking mushrooms
In summer

Here come the dancers, half Greek half sky

Fragrance of goat’s milk and iron—

All day, blind, alone, talking to myself

(For that’s how it was

Lonely kid telling stories to no one

In a bomb shelter, 1960

Already in love with Hercules

Who must have had friends.)

 

I lay on cement whispering—

How storying unfolded

Talking in the dark

Breathing odors of Army blankets.

Who loves you, who doesn’t

Where’s a lucky window

How high the sun, my lips moving.

 

Even now I talk to myself.

My wife sees me, says,

“what are you saying?”

I shrug. How can I tell her?

I recite fragments as some boys skip pebbles.

It might be someone else’s words

Maybe Ezra Pound:

“And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass…”

Then again it’s just me: “Trace

The veins of a barberry leaf

That’s Braille enough…”

In sidelong darkness of broken manners

When the day is insufficient

Minutes not feeding me

Up river go the words the outcast words.

Oh anything will do.

 

Someone has to sing so I do

Beside the hole, my father’s grave

& it’s April snowing Jesus distant

Our Savior much like a blue jay

Going about his business

Talking to no one

Up in a birch.

 

I take a bird as counsel

Say to my father

“Life was given us

That we will sing

To ghost & bird.”

 

Ezra Pound in my dream, the young poet

Resembled a singing cobbler—

Instead of shoes he held

Sheets of papyrus

One in each hand

Two stark white portals

Beckoned as if one could enter

 

& veins on pages

Words & omens

Fritillaries

Butterflies

Theban scrimshaw

Flesh perfected

Diagrams of possible life